Claims bug made it track nonusers

11 Apr, 2015

Facebook releases a blog post about its investigation into claims that it tracked users without their consent, acknowledging the collection of nonusers’ data.

The report gets it wrong multiple times in asserting how Facebook uses information to provide our service to more than a billion people around the world…We don’t [track non-users], and this is not our practice. However, the researchers did find a bug that may have sent cookies to some people when they weren’t on Facebook. This was not our intention—a fix for this is already under way…Our practice is not to place cookies on the browsers of people who have visited sites with Social Plugins but who have never visited Facebook.com to sign up for an account. The authors identified a few instances when cookies may have been placed, and we began to address those inadvertent cases as soon as they were brought to our attention.